Wikipedia, says its bandwidth costs have gone up 50% since Jan 2024

https://bsky.app/profile/cameronwilson.bsky.social/post/3llt2a6b3bu2v

by vinnyglennon • 1 year ago

49 45 1 year ago

explain2• 1 year ago

Shouldn't be paying for bandwidth.

No such thing as a free lunch - whatever balance sheet it lands on, every byte of every request costs someone something.

Affric• 1 year ago

Yep but Wikipedia exists to freely disseminate information to humans. Should they pay for the bandwidth for AI agents?

stefan_• 1 year ago

No, the link exists, every second you saturate it or not, and if not it's just lost bytes.

sitkack2• 1 year ago

How to tell people you don’t know how carrier grade internet connections work.

explain2• 1 year ago

Bandwidth is dirt cheap. I do 30 petabytes per month.

bsimpson3• 1 year ago

I used to be a Wikipedia donor, until there was an article that made the rounds a few years ago that argued that Wikipedia-the-website is essentially funded in perpetuity, and that the "Jimmy Wales needs your help or kittens will die" scarebanners are actually raising money for the Wikimedia foundation to spend on its own political ends.

danpalmer3• 1 year ago

"its own political ends" being Wikipedia shaped things, that seems like a fairly good thing to donate to.

jjice2• 1 year ago

I’m personally cool with Wikimedia doing whatever they want with their notations since it’s public and everything, but the donation banners definitely lead you to believe that it goes directly towards hosting if you don’t dive in.

bsimpson3• 1 year ago

I found the Twitter thread that I believe was the source of this; claims that they granted money to culture war institutions:

https://x.com/echetus/status/1579776106034757633

I love Wikipedia as a free source of history, but I have no interest in donating money to them as a proxy in the culture war.

rvba• 1 year ago

It is not wikipedia shaping things. It's politics, travel and lunches.

The foundation does not csre about wikipedia. They dont even try to clean it up from the agents who "shape" articles. You very often can see a situation where two admins help each other. Nobody reviews this really. I mean you can ask a "check user" - who will decline to check if the admins arent sock puppet accounts / multi accounts.

Nobody from foundation fights the deletionist, dishonest admin clique and people who discourage everyone feom editing wikipedia by racing to have the most reverts.

(Also what is with the random quotes added to every article now, that look like writing of 12 year olds. No more concise articles)

palata4• 1 year ago

But that's not Wikipedia.

Because the Wikimedia Foundation has Wikipedia, which I love, doesn't mean I love (or even know) everything the Wikimedia Foundation does. I would donate to Wikipedia, but they apparently don't need it.

Same thing for Firefox: I would donate to Firefox, but I have to give to Mozilla that does a bunch of other stuff and doesn't even treat Firefox the way I would want them to. So I don't donate.

patrick451• 1 year ago

Same. After learning that Wikipedia is not, in fact, about to go off the internet for lack of funds, I came to hold a very dim view Wikipedia organization.

random3• 1 year ago

Somehow you have a problem donating to a free service that has imense utility, because of some random reasons someone posted online, but likely paying for tons of other crap that is proven to finance various stuff that you’d be against, but have no clue it’s happening.

chneu• 1 year ago

The wikimedia foundation spends a ton of money on nonsense stuff. Look it up, a lot of people don't like the wikimedia foundation for very valid reasons.

The constant calls for donations are to support the foundation, not the website, but they make it look like Wikipedia could disappear at any moment.

Their cost for bandwidth is a rounding error vs their salaries and other costs that the foundation racks up.

https://youtu.be/MpeOFvxor_0

sien• 1 year ago

From 'What it Costs to Run Wikipedia'

Wikipedia spends $US 3m on hosting in 2024. They spend $US 107m on salaries.

So their hosting costs might have gone to, say, $US 5m at the outside.

That is they are maybe 1/20th of their salary cost.

AI's extra scraping might be a problem for some folks. But for wikipedia to talk about the percentage increase is disingenuous.

Source :

https://www.saastr.com/what-is-costs-to-run-wikipedia-3m-in-...

basisword2• 1 year ago

I don't understand the argument here. If your company had hosting costs increase this much and said "hey sien, we're going to cover the costs by cutting your salary" I don't think you'd be thrilled. Non-profits have staff and they have to pay them.

falcor842• 1 year ago

Non-profits have staff and they have to pay them.

Being the devil's advocate, there are are quite a lot of smaller non-profits that are entirely volunteer-run. While Wikipedia's mission might inherently be big enough to merit a few salaried employees, I can't fathom why they need so many. As per Wilde's famous quip, it seems to me that "the bureaucracy is expanding to meet the needs of the expanding bureaucracy".

kshacker• 1 year ago

I think the fine print in a report is not an issue but the incendiary blue sky headline is.

redundantly• 1 year ago

An increase in bandwidth costs is an increase. There's nothing disingenuous about that.

I imagine it also takes a toll on server, power, and maintenance (staff time) costs as well.

atonse2• 1 year ago

But a 50% increase of a relatively small amount is still a relatively small amount.

So it helps to show exactly how much more.

mvdtnz• 1 year ago

So you think it's a fine trade for them to relinquish, say, 8-10 staff members in order to feed an AI machine they never asked for?

atonse2• 1 year ago

Do we even know what percentage of their hosting costs is bandwidth?

basisword2• 1 year ago

The reason?

> a rise they attribute to AI crawlers. AI companies are killing the open web by stealing visitors from the sources of information and making them pay for the privilege

jjice2• 1 year ago

How lazy are these people scraping Wikipedia that they can do a bit of research to see there’s an entire dump provided by Wikipedia directly?

https://dumps.wikimedia.org/

acdha• 1 year ago

Their entire industry is built on not paying for data. They aren’t going to spend their own money optimizing this until they have to pay the costs for their design choices.

damnesian• 1 year ago

Spending money to make money is one of the pillars of capitalism. Getting things for free is anathema. Isn't it strange no one is calling out tech billionaires for "communism" yet the social safety net we need and pay for gets that ding on the daily?

eurleif• 1 year ago

I'm curious what would happen if Wikipedia tried to sign up for a $200/month Cloudflare plan and use it for all their content. In theory, that would be consistent with Cloudflare's ToS; and while there have been examples of Cloudflare sales reps trying to pressure customers with larger bandwidth needs to spend more, executives have said (including in comments here on Hacker News) that those sales reps were acting against policy, and that unlimited bandwidth really does mean unlimited.

Wikipedia, says its bandwidth costs have gone up 50% since Jan 2024

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